FruitOfTheVale
Superstar
This thread was inspired from a post I wrote earlier today which is featured below.
Other relevant info:
Come to think of it, is there a single other major city in America where the projects are "othered" the way they are in San Francisco where they're not on the city grid, surrounded by the freeway and far away from commercial districts? For reference I'm talking about something resembling Alemany:
The actual Bernal Heights neighborhood is up the hill and the Alemany projects are on the flats right next to the freeway (foreground). This complex is literally known as "The Black Hole" which is apt because there's only one way in/out and it's the only concentration of black people in Bernal Heights outside of the Holly Courts projects a couple blocks up the street. Are there any other low income complexes in other major American cities that mirror this level of separation from the same neighborhood? To the point where you can tell the government intentionally designed it to keep nikkas broke and out of sight
The Bottoms in Inglewood is the only one that comes to mind in LA, it definitely qualifies though. It's incredibly separated from the surrounding Inglewood area despite being right behind a busy intersection (Crenshaw & Century), you would never know it exists unless you hit the right onto Darby from Crenshaw thinking you was about to take the backway to Costco
I can't think of a single low income complex in Oakland, Seattle or Vegas that was clearly designed to tuck nikkas out of sight and out of mind... Seavey Circle in Sacramento is out the way but not to the extent that Alemany or The Bottoms are.
For that matter I've never seen no shyt like that in Philly, Chicago, Boston or New York either The obvious explanation is that the Bay built its projects near the ports/military bases where migrant Southern blacks were finding work. Alameda Point and Treasure Island have very similar low income buildings to the ones in Marin City and Hunters Point that are similarly predominantly black. The military chooses remote locations for strategic reasons which oddly enough was doubly convenient for them when they started testing nuclear weapons in Hunters Point and Treasure Island. Nobody cared that Hunters Point's infant mortality and cancer rates were 6x the city average even after the military admitted they were testing nukes (look up Superfund sites for more info) because the victims were black babies. It only became a problem when 40 years later real estate investors realized that the projects were sitting on prime waterfront and that the radiation would deter monied people from buying the cookie cutter condos they're building now
In other words this black poverty island shyt is a California thing The vast majority of poor black neighborhoods in American cities were formerly white and middle/upper middle class before white flight because they were close to the jobs (i.e. inner city)... even the projects in most American cities were originally intended for poor whites to get on their feet. California (and especially San Francisco) actually went ahead and built ghettos strictly for nikkas Even more sad is that that shyt really worked, the black median household income in San Francisco city is $29,500... As opposed to $104,000 for whites. Keep in mind that the national household median income for black families was $33,000 in 2012... How the fukk is nikkas in San Francisco making less than the national average when the majority of the country's black population is in the dirt cheap South?! Never mind that the economy in SF is the strongest it's ever been
All that to say this... IDK if I can call Boston the most racist big city in America with a straight face. The economic racism in San Francisco is unlike anything I've seen in any comparably "cosmopolitan" major city. They got nikkas living in Alabama by the Bay frfr word to James Baldwin.
@Meh @Erratic415
Other relevant info:
- The black population has diminished by 44% since 1990
- Blacks compromise roughly 80% of the housing authority population (or 16,000 out of the total 19,000) which equates to roughly 40-50% of the total black population. In other words, half of San Francisco's black population lives in the projects
- No affirmative action in California, blacks generally hover around 2-3% of admissions in state schools despite being 6.6% of the total state population. SF State is a noticeable exception to this (5.5% black) although it still doesn't match our state representation.
- Eminent domain was used to wipe out the black economy in San Francisco, specifically that of the Fillmore. The government constructed the Hayes Valley freeway in 1951 right through the middle of the neighborhood which increased pollution and created more separation from surrounding neighborhoods. 10 years later in the 60's they razed the half of the neighborhood that sat east of Fillmore and they built housing projects... All in the name of "urban renewal"
- Bayview (heart of SF black community) did not have a lightrail line until 2006 (as opposed to all the other lines being built in the 70s/80s)... this directly coincided with outside investors and real estate developers showing interest in "redeveloping" the neighborhood. In other words Bayview was disenfranchised from the rest of the city until white people/foreign investors wanted it.
- The black homicide rate in San Francisco is crazy, any given year we account for 40-60% of the murder victims despite being 6% of the city. Some years the rate is 150+/100,000 which is way higher than the black homicide rate in any other CA city including Oakland which generally hovers around 60/100,000. Frankly I think this mostly has to do with half of SF's black population living in extreme poverty.
- Not one SFPD officer has ever been brought to court in a case of police brutality with a black victim in San Francisco. Keep in mind this is the same region that birthed the Black Panthers and you'll understand howthat really is. When the Zodiac killer was on the loose in the 70s the SFPD wrongfully rounded up and beat hundreds of nikkas because they assumed it was an angry black man killing all those white folks
- Gang injunctions were heavily used in SF to criminalize black men congregating on the sidewalk in large groups... No, really. The worst part was that if the gang task force snapped a photo of a "known gang member" hanging with a group of people with no criminal record, they would literally track down the names of the other people and put them on the gang injunction purely by association. nikkas would literally be arrested for violating a gang injunction they had no idea they were on in the first place And by "violate", I mean hanging outside of your project building with the folks/family members you grew up with These injunctions have been strategically used as a "hard" gentrification tactic. nikkas can't be outside in our own neighborhoods now even for a pickup basketball game so white people feel comfortable putting up coffee shops and other yuppie businesses a couple blocks away from the jects. You see their clientele walking their toy dogs all in front of the jects now in the daytime. Seriously. This really hit black San Francisco hard because half the population is heavily concentrated in the jects... these neighborhoods are literally ghosttowns during the daytime. It's incredibly sad.
- Gentrification... nuff said
Last edited: